April Fool

Yes the post that precedes this, about the 4D smart camera, is my idea of a joke. Most cultures observe April 1^st as a day on which to perpetrate jokes, japes, hoaxes and assorted wizard wheezes, so I thought I should join in.

But joking aside, I do believe we should consider time as a dimension by which we can analyze images. What I mean is, don’t look at just a single image; grab multiple.

This is particularly effective when looking at an object in motion. The lighting will inevitably change as the part moves, which may alter edge detection, OCV and so on. In fact this is one of the ideas behind the Checker family from Cognex. They run at high frame rates, giving “another chance to see” as the TV people like to say. But in this case, the second image is not a repeat because it will invariably be slightly different, if only due to noise.

And this opens up the possibility of image averaging on the cheap, something I mentioned in “Dealing with noise in an image” back in February.

Those Checkers, they may not be smart but they sure are fast.